Some ways to write faster

Everyone these days wants to write more words. Or they want to teach you how to write more words. Either way, it’s kind of an ebook craze right now.

I’ve been reading a bunch of those “write faster” books lately – partly for research and partly because, well, I do actually want to produce more words – and I decided to put together a few of my favorite tips from what I’ve read. These are all really practical, and you can start doing them right away. As in, right now. Get to the bottom of this blog post and write, you animal!

Ahem.

Word sprints

Yeah, yeah, I know I harp on these a lot. But so does everyone else, because… they work. Chris Fox has it right: if you track your word sprints, you get a lot out of them. You start to really feel the progress you’re making, motivating you to keep writing, to keep sprinting. (Try out his tracking spreadsheet! I personally use something simpler, but he’s done a lot of work to make it easy.)

If it helps, challenge someone else – another writer or aspiring writer – to join you or participate in a friendly competition. NaNoWordSprints on Twitter is a great place to find strangers to sprint with, if you don’t personally know anyone who wants to participate in such chaos.

How to start: Set a five-minute timer, put yourself in a position to write using your favorite medium, and don’t stop until the timer’s up. Do this until you’re satisfied with your word count.

Invisible ink

As I wrote in a previous blog post, invisible ink is a tactic to keep you from looking at what you’ve been writing and therefore wanting to edit it.

How to start: Open your favorite word processing software of choice, and change the font to match the color of the window (in the case of Microsoft Word or OneNote, it would likely be white). Keep typing, because you can’t slow down to read what you just wrote!

The Parentheses Process

Another one I’ve written about before, the Parentheses Process basically goes like this: if you can’t think of it now, put brackets around the most useful description of what should go there, and move on.

How to start: Choose a piece of writing you’re stuck on, and use brackets right now to “skip past” the hard stuff. Keep skipping every time you reach something you can’t write right now, and you’ll get to the end faster.

Dictation

I’ve just started down this path, and I’m sure I’ll have updates for you soon. In fact, a good portion of this blog post was actually written with my voice! I’m lucky to have a very nice microphone, but you don’t really have to have a fancy setup to get started. All you need is a copy of Windows 10, a microphone of some sort, and a quiet room to talk to yourself.

I don’t actually recommend dictating everything. The system isn’t really optimized for fiction (not even Dragon Naturally Speaking, the industry’s leading dictation software). But this blog post, as mentioned above, was fairly easy to dictate. The style is conversational, and it’s not that hard to think about where I need to punctuate.

How to start: Make sure your Windows 10 computer is on (at least) the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update. Use the shortcut Start + H on your keyboard to open the dictation bar (it seems to work in Edge and Microsoft Office products for sure), and start dictating.

To make things a little easier, here is a starting list of phrases you’ll need if you want to punctuate as you dictate (full list of what the native Windows speech recognition can do is here):

“Period”

“Comma”

“Exclamation mark”

“Question mark”

“Open quote”

“Close quote”

“New line”

Cheatsheets

I’m working on a how-to book right now, intended to help aspiring short story writers get their sea legs, and the way I’m structuring the content, I’m going to create myself a cheatsheet, a tactic I’ve mentioned before. Content that is repetitive or structured in a certain way is ripe for this kind of “hack.”

How to start: Take note of all of the elements in the repetitive content. Are there headers, sections, common transitions? Build yourself an outline that touches on each of these elements, and save it somewhere for easy copying the next time you need to produce that kind of content again.

Setting your scene

I recently read a book called Novel Shortcuts, Chapter 4 of which was about setting up a scene before you start writing it. Whitcomb writes about three tactics she uses to ensure that she skips past a lot of “shitty first draft” problems, which I’ve found incredibly useful as I revise my novel “Portent.”

How to start: List out your scene’s physical and internal actions, beat by beat, including the goal, the conflict, and what is unresolved (whether or not it gets resolved in your scene). Next, write the dialogue version of your scene – “write out what has to be communicated,” is how Whitcomb describes it. (When you actually write the scene, this will likely get distilled down into just a few key crisp lines.) Finally, write the “heartstorm” version of the scene (instead of a “brainstorm”) – focus only on the sensory details the character(s) will experience.

Now, when you sit down to write the real scene, you’ll already have all of this raw material to draw from. This keeps you from going off track and keeps the scene moving in the direction the story needs to take.